You mean the time to render is overdone?

No, some settings overcranked, as you stated.

Looks nice operaguy, but... how dramatically does the render time change if the figures are wearing clothes (I know thats not the norm) and hair..??

And there have been a few posts about strange artifacts appearing with clothes, etc., on figures.

All irrelevant now, I'm gonna get away from the computer for a while.

pjz99, here is my single figure with artifacts..... same settings that you had posted on another thread, but i'm not sure if you scaled up in that one. I don't know how to do that.

cast shadow, raytracing
bounces  4
irradience caching 80
indirect light
light quality 4
pix samples 8
min shading rate .10

no smooth polygons

1 ibl light in the scene.

What am i doing wrong? how do i scale up a scene?

In my opinion none of the effects "look" over cranked as in 'bad.' It is just that the time was high for no reason because I unnecessarily had them set hight with no appreciable improvement. However, aside for render time mike if you or anyone also feel something also looks wrong please specifically comment, would be appreciated.

I am working with clothing and hair now, will post results tomorrow. First reaction is that hair sim vastly improved.

::::: Opera :::::

The final builds had to go to "manufacturing", whatever that is, by a certain date in order to be available as a "Gold" image for disk burning. The same version is on the web site - why I don't know.

Meanwhile, a "HotFix" patch (not a complete SR, just a few files replaced) was prepared that included the normal map omission, as well as some splotchy IDL fixes. I think these are what you're seeing above.

I thought this HotFix was to be offered immediately, and you guys would have the same version I do. For whatever reason, that was not the case.

The HotFix will be available by the end of the week. Keep an eye out for it. It will be a very small download.

Quote -
In my opinion none of the effects "look" over cranked as in 'bad.' It is just that the time was high for no reason because I unnecessarily had them set hight with no appreciable improvement. However, aside for render time mike if you or anyone also feel something also looks wrong please specifically comment, would be appreciated

No I just think it looks too.... "glowy" for realistic GI.
I know you just got LightWave. Plop a ball or something on a floor and against a wall and give everything bright colors, then crank up the GI bounces and intensity. You'll get the same sort of effect, where there is more light bouncing around and not being absorbed than there ought to be.
It can be a real cool effect, but it's not accurate.
Unless you weren't trying to be accurate, but just showing the GI intensity you can achieve in Poser 8.

noted BB

AO in shaders with indirect light can take a loooong time. Avoid it if you can. What's happening is that the indirect light is tracing a couple hundred (or thousand, depending your settings) rays for every red dot in the prepass to find out the light coming from the environment. To get that, it has to evaluate the shaders on every surface it encounters - and AO again spawns extra rays. So things can become very, very expensive.

Indirect light will skip AO on lights, as AO is the fast approximation of what indirect light is doing for real. In shaders, however, it gets evaluated as it could be used for anything - not just plain occlusion, you can make some really cool procedurals with it, like rust in corners.

operaguy could you post your settings?

Quote -
Indirect light will skip AO on lights, as AO is the fast approximation of what indirect light is doing for real. In shaders, however, it gets evaluated as it could be used for anything - not just plain occlusion, you can make some really cool procedurals with it, like rust in corners.

I think BB said in another thread to make sure NOT to use AO (including in shaders) when using IDL.

ok I am on board with that.

no AO

hmmm.... If I have no AO in nodes and I have no lights, then all responsibility for shadows is up to IDL? My first render was like that and it was pretty flat. That's why I started pumping AO into the nodes.

::::: Opera :::::

Quote - click for full size/resolution.

V4 in Poser8 GI

Only illumination is from several glowing boxes, the one behind her having a gold procedural material.

Only shadows from AO in nodes.

Took over an hour to render, but I probably had some settings over cranked. No Postwork

::::: Opera :::::

i hope that if people will render sometimes without lights that they will not forget about the highlights(specular).

even if a box is glowing there is still some specular. so i hope people will create an extra ''specular '' light for better results.i know that just did a test render.

but i am afraid that people will post in the gallery  renders and claim that they did a realistic render without lights.

no lights
no AO in nodes
V4 with her hi-res maps and default shaders
there is a glowing cube in front of her, in back of her and on top. I fidddled around with the ambient, the one in front is at 2.25 I think and the others from 1.0 to 2.10 or whatever. You have to experiment

Also, the number of bounces drives brightness. This is one bounce!

Aren't we supposed to be mutiple bouncing here? I might turn down the ambient and crank up the bounces to see if there is a qualitiative difference.

With no AO the render is pretty fast. All four cores were pegged out at 100% and it was sucking in 2.2 G of physical and another 2.2 of paged.

render time was 464 seconds

pretty good!

I think it is underlit from the front, however. turning up bounces on next one

If you are rendering a single figure in empty space you are getting very little practical benefit from Global Illumination techniques.  With 1 bounce, again, less practical benefit than you should get.

edit: note the smudgy artifacts over the eye and over the ear.

don't the rays bounce off the cubes?

i see the smudges, yes.

::::: Opera :::::

If your goal is to simulate a universe where there is one person, and a glowing cube, and empty space everywhere else in the universe, this is a great test.  Otherwise no.  You could set the maximum number of bounces and you'd still get a decidedly odd result.  At the very least, you must have a polygonal ground plane, and then you'd have a universe of a single person standing on a perfectly flat floor.

GI light does not bounce off of air.  If the only thing in your scene is the one character and maybe the light-emitting surface, nearly all the rays emitted by the light will hit the character once and then vanish off into the empty universe.  You need a polygonal environment to render in.  If you're trying to simulate indoor light, then a cube is a good place to start.  All this testing you're doing will be dramatically different from what you'd get once you place the character in a room or, if outdoors, near the ground or some structures.

My goal is to figure out if this feature is worth incorporating. I am just trying to get in control of the feature at this point. I don't start with the interior of Falling Water with Wright and 10 people milling around and the stream rushing by.

Having fun.

What I'm trying - and evidently failing - to get across is that you will never accomplish your goal with these tests.  Is it hard to load a cube or sphere primitive into your scene?  You don't have to do this, but you will get wonky results and they will differ greatly from what you'll get when you use GI in a way that makes sense.  You're basically running a blood test on distilled water.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time, if you really just enjoy rendering naked people hanging in empty space it's all good.

You are not a good listener.

It's all good.

Love the banter

A couple of other things to report:

"Cancelling" is way way more responsive.
Cloth room sim working fine
Dynamic Hair sim WITH COLLISION is vastly better.

Moving from room to room is very glitchy, inclucing crash to desktop, if you have a floating preview window.

I gave up trying to add my Poser 7 runtime as a library. It 'worked' in that the folder was found, but only a few items show up!

Tried adding a mirror to my scene, reflection shaders apparently not a friend of the Poser8GI, it just slammed to a halt.

:: og ::

Quote - I gave up trying to add my Poser 7 runtime as a library. It 'worked' in that the folder was found, but only a few items show up!*

stevey3d and LeeMoon reported the same problem, both on Macs, on this thread:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2778469

Quote - > Quote -

Indirect light will skip AO on lights, as AO is the fast approximation of what indirect light is doing for real. In shaders, however, it gets evaluated as it could be used for anything - not just plain occlusion, you can make some really cool procedurals with it, like rust in corners.

I think BB said in another thread to make sure NOT to use AO (including in shaders) when using IDL.

If ever stewer and I seem to contradict, believe stewer. He is the guy who wrote the renderer for SM. (In case you didn't know)

I thought I said in the other thread that light-based AO would be ignored automatically, and material-based should be removed.

stewer also said to turn off AO when using GI variables in poser 7 (as an effect similar to AO was one result of enabling indirect light calculations).

Ok, stewer is now my god of render settings.

Hot fix has been posted!
 

in re: using glowing boxes as light sources in a no-lights scene, they may not work like the various other light types:

• they may seem to directly illuminate a diffuse/specular posersurface, but they may not do GIbounces off diffuse surfaces (e.g. girl in white room, walls with normals forward)
• they may not interact with atmosphere
• et al.

I dunno when they'll add real area lites to poser.

Quote - If ever stewer and I seem to contradict, believe stewer. He is the guy who wrote the renderer for SM. (In case you didn't know)

I thought I said in the other thread that light-based AO would be ignored automatically, and material-based should be removed.

I think I didn't make myself clear. Remove AO on shaders. The reason why I didn't make the renderer do it automatically is because there are few, very few cases where AO can be used for procedural patterns and I wanted those cases to get correct indirect light. I think I've seen a few shaders from Ajax doing that, but not anyone else's.

Oh, and Operaguy: that is an insane number of pixel samples. Taking it down to 3-9 should give you identical renders in less time.

At some point in the not too distant future, I am going to put together a webinar and try and drag both stewer and bagginsbill into the discussion. We have some kinks to work out to make that happen, but I have a hunch getting them both into an actual Q&A about rendering, lighting and shader nodes would be wicked useful.

As soon as that looks like a reality, I'll start puting the word out.

Cooper

Quote - Hot fix has been posted!
 

Where? I didn't get any email about it and CP doesn't have any forums.

http://my.smithmicro.com/win/poser/updates.html WINDOWS
http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/poser/updates.html MAC

Be aware this does not fix the GI splotch artifacts problem I was showing earlier, it's still there.

Okay, let me see if I got that right:

AO on shaders + GI is a no-no, but AO on light + GI is all right?

Given light coming out of Ambient shaders doesn't cast shadows, you still need some way to create the appearance of shadowing. Easy if you use also a real light in your scene, but is there any clever way of doing it if you don't (given you can't add AO to an non-existing light)?

No that's not right, quite. Almost.

Stewer says if you enable GI, the AO on a light is automatically ignored, effectively disabled, so you do not need to touch it, because it has become irrelevent.

However, AO on a shader is NOT ignored, and should only be there for the purposes of detecting crevices, not to do shadows. This is an advanced technique that I rarely see, so you can just assume that if you have an Ambient_Occlusion node in your shader, going into any sort of Diffuse_Value, it should be removed.

As for the shadows, glowing (ambient) objects do cast shadows with GI. Shadow casting happens anytime something blocks the view to another source of light, including self-lit things, as well as externally lit things. The diffuse reflections from one surface to another can be blocked by an intervening surface. It happens naturally as a result of the algorithm.

have not played with them (have no idea if they work) but look at the areas circled in red in the attached image...

Whooah! Now what the heck?

On mine, I cannot click the Enable Indirect Light - it is disabled.

But if I turn it on in standard render settings, then these controls seem to do something. Only one I tested so far is Intensity, but it did work. Wow.

Regarding the blotchy artifacts problem: as a workaround, I have spent most of the day working in a light rack figure, since you can't save lights into a prop from within Poser, although I guess I could have hand-written a pp2 file.  It works but it has some wierd behavior.

Features:

• A simple piece of geometry (fat arrow, 13 polygons) that acts as a handle to move the lights as a unit; the geometry is forced to be hidden from render, exempt from ratracing and to not cast shadows (I've done a lot of items like this, nothing tricky for these features).
  - Seven spotlights, with one in the center and six arranged in a rosette around the center.  Seven is a lot, more than some users may care for; turn one or more off and re-save as you prefer.  You can also rearrange the layout of the lights as you see fit and make a rectangle or what have you.
• The handle can be set to "Point At" another object in the scene, and the handle will control the lights; this has the advantage of not making the lights' rays converge on a single point.  You can still tilt the individual lights if you really, really want to.
• A dial on the handle for "Master Intensity" that controls kdIntensity on all seven lights.  This is a little flaky, see below.
• A set of dials on the handle to control kdRed, kdGreen and kdBlue on all seven lights.  I found that when the master dials are loaded with a non-zero value, whether fresh from the library or when re-loading a saved scene that contains the light rack, each of the seven lights's R/G/B values are jumped to 1 (they really should be zero).  I gave up on trying to get this to behave correctly.  This means that each light is actually putting out twice the amount of light that the kdIntensity value would lead you to believe.  To compensate, the Master Intensity value only dials up a half a percent on the slave dials per unit of 1.  I'm pretty sure this is okay for Intensity values up to 100%.  Past that, intensity values will be dialed up incorrectly.  However, I really think that seven lights at 100% intensity is WAY WAY WAY more than you'd ever want to use, so I don't think this is a problem.  Bagginsbill you may want to give this a little thought, I'd like to know whether you agree.  At the very worst I've also got a pose file that can zero out the R/G/B values on each light.
• A dial called "Spread" that scales the X and Z axes of the handle, and has the effect of smoothly expanding the radius of the rosette of outer lights.  By default the whole rack is about 2.5 feet across, just about what you would find in a studio "umbrella" light.  This render is with the Spread dial at default (zero, or 2.5 feet across).
• The lights are set to use raytraced shadows with 5 degree blur, with shadow min bias of 0.1.  I've used these settings for a long time in Poser 7 and I consider them "okay".  I am not an optics expert, so feel free to tinker.  I will say that a lower than default value for shadow min bias is pretty necessary, to obtain shadows in very small geometry like eyelashes or stuff like I'm rendering here.

Some caveats:

• Light attenuation/falloff is not turned on.  I'll experiment with that tomorrow after I get a little sleep.  I've been more busy trying to get it to not render shit than striving for perfection.  One step at a time.  In any case I'm almost positive that a one-button control for attenuation cannot be implemented, but I can offer alternate CR2s that have the feature turned off or on, and the user can pick which one to load.  This shouldn't be a big deal.
• I would like to get a master dial to control shadow blur radius.  I did the dials for this rig by hand using Dimension3D's Poser File Editor and couldn't get a dial set up for this property of the lights, because it's not a channel.  I don't really like the internals of the new Dependent Parameters Editor (not the fault of Deecey's documentation, I just don't like the results it leaves you with), but I will give it another chance tomorrow in the hope that it will cover a light's blur radius.
• I found many interesting and fun bugs with trying to use lights in this way.  For example, did you know that if you set a light to Locked, Poser turns off shadows for that light?  Well it does!  Isn't that great?

Hopefully I will have something ready for people to take a whack at tomorrow.

ps: the garbage along the border is unrelated to the scene contents or render settings or lighting, I get that on every render (already made a ticket for this via smith micro tech support).

Err ... another caveat, sometimes the Intensity values goes nuts for all the slave lights and pops to a much higher value than it's set to when you start a render.  I have no idea why.

I seem to have some issues with my shadows. You'll find the issue in the attached picture.

The settings used were:
 - Cast shadows: On
 - Raytracing: On
      - Raytrace bounces: 1
      - Irradiance Caching: 50
 - Indirect light: On
      - Indirrect light quality: 4
      - Pixel Samples: 1
      - Min shading rate: 1.00
      - Max Bucket Size: 32
 - Smooth Polygons: On

I tried as well with the settings described above, but Poser seems to crash on those settings. Let it run a whole night without Poser advancing...

Andro

I missed the name of the script, I'd love to check it out too!  Looks like it's Dimension 3D's but not sure where to find it ....

I agree, there's no need whatsoever to go above 700% intensity for anything where the light rack provides any value.

Scropts -> Partners -> Dimension3D I think.

And, the problem you're having is caused by casting raytraced shadows through transparency (the hair).  You may want to try turning blur radius up a bit, it appears to be zero.  If it's still too gritty, the only other good approach I know of is to use multiple lights that are a little offset from each other (like the light rack I'm talking about).

Bagginsbill you're not concerned about the doubled R/G/B values for lights?  I think this just means that the light puts out twice as much light as Intensity shows, but I wanted your opinion.

Thanks PJZ

Quote - Hello,

I seem to have some issues with my shadows. You'll find the issue in the attached picture.

The settings used were:
 - Cast shadows: On
 - Raytracing: On
      - Raytrace bounces: 1
      - Irradiance Caching: 50
 - Indirect light: On
      - Indirrect light quality: 4
  **    - Pixel Samples: 1
**      - Min shading rate: 1.00
      - Max Bucket Size: 32
 - Smooth Polygons: On

I tried as well with the settings described above, but Poser seems to crash on those settings. Let it run a whole night without Poser advancing...

Andro

Pixel Samples 1 produces aliasing and grainy shadows. Never use less than 3 for anything but a test render. Use 6 to 8 for high quality - and combine this with a post filter that works well, such as Sync, 2 or 3 pixels.

Quote - Bagginsbill you're not concerned about the doubled R/G/B values for lights?  I think this just means that the light puts out twice as much light as Intensity shows, but I wanted your opinion.

Oh I missed that. I'm close to nodding off - 1:40 am here.

Uh, yeah that's doubling the intensity. Hmm - this could get unwieldy.

If I want the equivalent of a single 80% spotlight, I must divide by 14 and use master intensity 5.71. I suppose that's workable.